A man in a mask and wearing a fat tank on his back is bent to the door of the
parking garage.
He is spraying and wiping, wiping and spraying. Another man with no mask
and no hair shuffle-dances around him,
gives a wave, crosses the street, tries to open the door to the hotel, which is
locked and closed, darkened for good:
Okay, now what? He turns and walks back toward the parking garage. The
man with the tank doesn’t look up,
he’s all about the door handle now, rubbing it again and again. The bald man
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play